31–36 of 36 posts
I’ve noticed that the MBA crowd (including some friends!) who jumped into the Bitcoing bandwagon at 10K are now hawking Quantum Computing.
> The most profound issue, however, concerns the meaning of quantum supremacy. After all, it doesn’t take qubits to solve important quantitative problems faster than any classical computer. Any carbon atom can “calculate” the solution of a very important practical problem—how does carbon behave?—simply by doing its thing. The author [1] is trivializes the notion of computational machine. Calculating using a classical…
The first aspect that you mention is actually not a disagreement but the whole point of his message - the recently popularized demonstrations of "quantum supremacy" did not allow for universal programmability, but instead were more comparable to an experimental setup for a particular problem of how do atoms behave in that setup. Having a proper quantum computer with enough fully programmable bits to demonstrate quant…
Where does Wilczek claim that? The only sentence I can see where he arguably comments on the programmability of Google's device is "the computation that Sycamore performed is very specialized". But this is before he brings up the carbon example, and he never says the programmability of Sycamore is comparable to the programmability of carbon.
Indeed, Sycamore is programable. It's obviously not capable of arbitrary-length computations, because the noise level is too high to be fault tolerant, but it has a certain accessible state space in which it can be arbitrarily configured. Here's Scott Aaronson if you don't believe me (emphasis mine):
> [Question:] Even so, there are countless examples of materials and chemical reactions that are hard to classically simulate, as well as special-purpose quantum simulators (like those of Lukin’s group at Harvard). Why don’t these already count as quantum computational supremacy?
> [Answer:] Under some people’s definitions of “quantum computational supremacy,” they do! The key difference with Google’s effort is that they have a fully programmable device—one that you can program with an arbitrary sequence of nearest-neighbor 2-qubit gates, just by sending the appropriate signals from your classical computer.
> In other words, it’s no longer open to the QC skeptics to sneer that, sure, there are quantum systems that are hard to simulate classically, but that’s just because nature is hard to simulate, and you don’t get to arbitrarily redefine whatever random chemical you find in the wild to be a “computer for simulating itself.” Under any sane definition, the superconducting devices that Google, IBM, and others are now building are indeed “computers.”
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4317
Therefore, I think abdullahkhalids's interpretation is right: Wilczek's carbon analogy is inapplicable.
> The most profound issue, however, concerns the meaning of quantum supremacy. After all, it doesn’t take qubits to solve important quantitative problems faster than any classical computer. Any carbon atom can “calculate” the solution of a very important practical problem—how does carbon behave?—simply by doing its thing. The author [1] is trivializes the notion of computational machine. Calculating using a classical…
I think he is well aware of this. The current quantum device Google build is however not much different than a sufficiently complex other physics experiment and so far they have not been able to demonstrate that it is capable of fault-tolerant error-corrected computation (which they basically won't be able to do in the foreseeable future).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first aspect that you mention is actually not a disagreement but the whole point of his message - the recently popularized demonstrations of "quantum supremacy" did not allow for universal programmability, but instead were more comparable to an experimental setup for a particular problem of how do atoms behave in that setup. Having a proper quantum computer with enough fully programmable bits to demonstrate quant…
> The first aspect that you mention is actually not a disagreement but the whole point of his message - the recently popularized demonstrations of "quantum supremacy" did not allow for universal programmability, but instead were more comparable to an experimental setup for a particular problem of how do atoms behave in that setup. Where does Wilczek claim that? The only sentence I can see where he arguably comments o…
The more I think about the distinction people are drawing, the fuzzier it gets in my mind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does one hawk Quantum Computing?
People riding the bandwagon and generally talking about it like they're in on it when they don't know what a qubit or bell state is (or how to read braket notation). It's a similar line to AI - if the people talk about it like it has the potential to (and eventually will) destroy the world, they probably don't know much about it (in that case they're conflating sentience with intelligence, and ignoring the word "arti…
Surely we can all agree that it doesn't take human or better intelligence to destroy the world.
...how about a nice game of chess?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The first aspect that you mention is actually not a disagreement but the whole point of his message - the recently popularized demonstrations of "quantum supremacy" did not allow for universal programmability, but instead were more comparable to an experimental setup for a particular problem of how do atoms behave in that setup. Where does Wilczek claim that? The only sentence I can see where he arguably comments o…
Devil's advocate: if you make a computerized system for generating a lot of similar atomic arrangements with random variations, then can't you call the process of placing the atoms "programming"? The more I think about the distinction people are drawing, the fuzzier it gets in my mind.